A blog about the full spectrum of gaming - video games, board-games, pen and paper RPGs - I play them, I make them, I'll write about them.

22 January 2012

Schmidtennistan-Files part 1: Discovery of a Nation

A discovery by my father gets my attention to a long-term game my grandfather and a friend of his played as kids. In this series I'll explain what it was and how it went, as far as I can tell by the files I have here.

My father gave me a folder, coming from
a box from my grandfather, who passed away in 2001. The box had
contained some serious things, such as my grandfathers WWII-dog-tags,
his P.O.W. dog-tag from an English POW-camp (which, according to the
red-cross observations I found on line, was one of the nicer camps to
have been to), and something that only looks serious at first glance:
The state file of a country called Schmidtennistan. My father said
something along the lines of "this is like the stuff you do",
referring to my role-playing groups and design-attempts. Little did
he know that this folder contained what I now regard as my heritage
as a 3rd generation gamer. Let me go backwards:

My father was a fanatical board-gamer
up until his late 20s. He and a buddy of his, when not buying old
cars to destroy in illegal crash-course activities in a local quarry,
once made their own room-sized version of Monopoly in a basement,
complete with intersections and lots of additional streets. As I have
heard, they never finished a game with it, usually giving up after a
week or two of playing but the point is, they made their own larger
version of a game already taking way too long but adding the element
of choice of movement, something which Monopoly probably direly
needs. Be that however it may be, I'd generally thought this to be
what gaming-heritage I had. I was wrong by a generation.

My grandfather was born in 1925 in a
conservative family and thus fully grew up in Nazi-Germany. Leaving
all ramifications this has about his socialization aside, it meant he
was playing games as a kid that were rather unfashionable in my
fathers youth in the 1960s: War games. The predecessor of
tabletop-strategy games such as Warhammer, which I myself played in
my teens, were games played with toy soldiers and often quite
elaborate made-up rules regarding movement, combat, casualties and
even rules of engagement. The files I my father gave me show that,
not only did my grandfather and a friend of his play war games
against each other in between age circa 12 and 16, but they (at least
my grandfather who was very meticulous about keeping it all on file)
also developed a long term story around it, making up their own
countries and keeping diplomatic relations. This includes things like
lists of prices for food as prescribed by government edict,
diplomatic mail threatening fictional allies, speeches written to
convince the parliament of the necessity to declare war on the other
and even proposals on how to finance an upgrade of fleets in reaction
to the other nation building more warships. The general tone of the
whole thing is so much like the documents of Nazi-Germany I know from
history lessons at school that it is quite clear that my grandfather
must have read a lot of official correspondence as a kid.

What I find most endearing about the
whole thing how dead-serious my grandfather wrote all of this down,
quite like I would have done it myself, even more so with internal
letters from one ministry to another WITHIN his own country. Then
come the army-lists, which are great to read as it goes into detail
about what toy-soldiers my grandfather owned (my father recalls
having played with the same toys as a kid) up to listings like
"Firing Soldier, standing up: 10. Firing soldier, kneeling down:
10". The only thing missing is intelligence-reports about the
enemies strength...

I'll try to analyze this folder like an
actual historical document and make some sense out of the bits I can
read. Luckily, my grandfather used a typewriter for most documents,
even designing different signatures for the different generals
forming the Junta governing Schmidtennistan. The folder is separated
into different ministries, as one would expect, some of them empty of
any paper, some filled with letters, propositions and lists. I'll go
through them in this series, sighting them one by one and then in the
end try to develop a time-line of this lengthy conflict of two
nations. Are you ready for the teeter-tottering between brotherhood
and mortal enmity between of

Schmidtennistan vs. Dreessenistan

To explain here: Schmidt was the last
name of my grandfather, Dreessen that of his best friend during
childhood. I think it's quite clear, how these state names came to be.
Apparently, the two friends wrote each other diplomatic letters and
sometimes fought it out on the battlefield with their toy soldiers
(those of my grandfather listed in the appropriate section of his
state-file) according to rules the two of them had set.

Having glance over the files of the
ministry of interior and the ministry of military and all these
sections of the folder, reading some of the speeches and communiques
going around in Schmidtennistan between 1937 and 1940, it's quite
obvious that the relationship between both countries was rather
difficult. There are speeches condemning the evils of the treacherous
Dreessenistani troops. There are letters of goodwill sent to the
Dreessenistani embassy, remarking how peace will benefit both nations
indefinitely. There are contracts of mutual protection against
mysterious other nations that are mentioned just once. Well but most
of the time it's about war, after all the two nations were background
for a series of battles fought out by toy soldiers an so the two of
them considered each other "Erbfeinde", a term that Germany
and France used for each other around the time too...

This is the first part of what I
project to become a three-part-series about the
war-game/role-playing-game/strategy-game my grandfather played as a
child. As we only know one side of the story, I'll likely be somewhat
partial in all of this but shall try to keep an open mind as a
historian analyzing the terrible conflict of these two nations.

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MadZabGaming

I make games and this is my blog. I create pen and paper RPGs, tabletop-games and sometimes even board-games in my free time and I will talk about these here. Also, opinions and musings about games in general, video games I play and anything related to this. Also gaming-diaries of video-games. If you like this sort of thing, you're at the right spot. This is a blog about the full spectrum of gaming - boardgames, pen and paper RPG, tabletop-strategy and video games.

Oh yeah, I take no responsibility for stuff contained in pages this blog may link to and neither do I claim ownership of any copyrighted names of corporations, products or software I may mention in this blog. The texts and graphics are mine though. Just to get the legal issues out of the way.